One of my favourite radio programmes is Desert Island Discs.
If you have not heard it — each week a famous person must imagine being cast away to a desert island and choose eight pieces of music to take with them. Usually, these eight songs tell a story about the person — they are literally the soundtrack of their lives.
When you think about your life — what would be the soundtrack of your life?
I was interested recently to hear the Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch choose a song that she had at her wedding. It was the Christian chorus Be still for the presence of the Lord. That is not a bad choice if you wanted to reduce your experience of God into one song.
Lots of the great songs of the Christian faith have a story attached to them. I think for example of John Newton’s Amazing Grace.
This week I was preaching on Psalm 18, which is one of the Bible’s great story songs. Psalm 18 is the soundtrack of King David’s life. The psalm is unusual in that it appears almost verbatim in 2 Samuel Chapter 22 as a summary of David’s life.
It is one of the Psalms that has a superscription, which serves as one of the earliest commentaries on the psalm.
“For the director of music. Of David the servant of the Lord. He sang to the Lord the words of this song when the Lord delivered him from the hand of all his enemies and from the hand of Saul.”
Robert Alter, the Jewish translator and commentator, writes,
“The superscription of this psalm is extraordinarily long. Perhaps this reflects an editorial desire to fit this into the biography of David, from which in fact the entire psalm was borrowed”.
The Psalm begins with David speaking about his love for the Lord
“I love you, Lord, My Strength.” (Psalm 18:1)
David uses a rare word for love here, that is normally used for the love of a greater for the lesser. David is expressing his passionate love and commitment to the Lord.
I was reminded from a surprising source that love is more is a feeling.
The singer Olivia Dean won a Grammy last week for Best New Act. Her second album was entitled The Art of Loving. The inspiration for the songs on the album came from reading the book All About Love by Bell Hooks, which talks about love as less a fantasy thing and more about a practice, a skill that you can get good at, a craft you can get better at.
I was interested to see how in the creative process of songwriting the 26-year-old Dean wrestled with the meaning of the word ‘love’. It occurred to me that this is what David does in his psalms and what preachers need to do in their sermons.
John the Apostle was the great preacher of love. In his first letter he turns the diamond of God’s love so that we see every glittering facet in its clearest light.
Love should not be less than a feeling, but it must always be so much more.
Photo by Daniel Öberg on Unsplash